1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method of analyzing a business process integration and management (BPIM) solution and, in particular, a system and method which analyzes a performance of a BPIM solution.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the advancement of information technology and business transformation, and to increase profits from its value chain, an enterprise has to be able to rapidly modify and adapt its business process and collaboration infrastructure. Business process integration and management (BPIM) is the key to building and managing an adaptive e-business solution infrastructure.
As an enabling technology of business process integration, Web (e.g., Internet) services provide a standardized means to allow heterogeneous applications to communicate with one another. However, existing e-business integration solutions are mostly custom-made by ground-up code development with many undesirable characteristics.
For example, such conventional methods are very labor intensive and very skill demanding. Further, such methods involve unstructured solution knowledge and are, therefore, shareable only at code level. In addition, the process is manually processed from business process model (BPM) to solution creation, and is not adaptable to updates and changes.
Further, business process integration and management (BPIM) is presently the hottest information technology (IT) services area. IT services customers are demanding cost effective solution development and deployment.
However, conventional systems take a long time to get a BPIM solution to market and have a poor development and deployment efficiency. In addition, such conventional systems do not provide a total development environment for the development of BPIM solutions. Thus, such conventional systems do not provide many features that are helpful to a user.
For example, some conventional systems (e.g., advocated by the Object Management Group (OMG)) include a Model Driven Architecture which employs a platform independent model (e.g., business execution model) and platform specific model (e.g., an implementation model), but does not employ applicable, more complex BPIM solutions.
Other conventional systems (e.g., Holosofx Business Process Management (BPM) Workbench) may include simulation and performance analysis, but such analyses are application only to business process level. Thus, this system is not suitable for execution level analysis.
Still other conventional systems (e.g., SAP Business Suite) may include a platform for implementation and monitoring of business processes. However, such systems lack modeling, simulation and performance analysis capabilities.